The nation needs a more efficient drilling regulator: An editorial

Michael Bromwich will exit his post this week as top federal regulator for offshore drilling. He leaves a mixed record, and his successor should draw some lessons from Mr. Bromwich's tenure.

Eliot Kamenitz, The Times-PicayuneMichael Bromwich, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, answers questions at the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Spill and Offshore Drilling meeting at the Riverside Hilton in July 2010.

Mr. Bromwich faced a difficult task when he was tapped to restructure the government's regulatory regime in the wake of the BP oil spill last year. He admitted he had only a thimble-full of knowledge of the oil and gas industry when he took the job. He learned quickly and was able to set up an agency that had to devise new safety standards and apply them as it evaluated drilling permits.

But Mr. Bromwich's new regulatory structure has proved clunky and inefficient. It did not issue the first new drilling plan after the spill until March-- almost a year after the spill.

The length of time it takes the agency to process permit applications has remained long as well, raising questions as to whether it has enough resources to carry out its mission. And operators have complained that regulators change the rules along the way, delaying the process even further.

That's not good for our region or for the nation, which depends on safe oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico to meet its growing energy needs. Retiring Coast Guard Rear Adm. James Watson, who will replace Mr. Bromwich, needs to make sure that the new regulatory bureaucracy becomes more efficient.

That doesn't mean that every permit application should be summarily approved, as was the case with many permits before the spill. Most Louisianians understand that the stricter rules are designed to help improve safety and prevent a potential repeat of the BP disaster. Bad drilling plans shouldn't get approval. But the new regulatory structure has been slow to process applications, regardless of whether they are approved or not.

There's also a broader point about how Mr. Bromwich came to view the oil and gas industry that Rear Adm. Watson needs to avoid.

Mr. Bromwich clearly believes the new federal safety standards he helped create may have saved the industry from a wholesale shutdown had another spill taken place. But that assertion parrots the Obama administration's erroneous view that the Deepwater Horizon blowout revealed industry-wide problems and that another accident might have been imminent.

That view prompted the administration's overreaction with a blanket drilling moratorium after the spill. Instead, numerous independent reports have indicated that the disaster was the consequence of reckless decisions from the companies involved in this specific project under BP's direction.

It would be a disservice to responsible operators if the government continues to assume, as Mr. Bromwich apparently does, that the entire industry was reckless. We hope that Rear Adm. Watson will see things differently.